Like Josef Cynaricz, in the city somewhere, with no one he could trust, scared. Scared of what? Of the police, for a start, regardless of whether he had or hadn’t killed Brunello. Because who would be easier to pin it on, if it turned out he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time?
And could he be scared of Marisa Goldman? She was supposed to have been long gone on some yacht, but was not. Sandro thought of the woman, looking down her long nose at him. Why had she lied?
But then again, if Josef had killed Brunello, battered that handsome cropped head into a pulp in some deranged frenzy — of what? Jealousy of the man’s life, hatred, greed? — not only would he not be the man Anna Niescu had fallen in love with, but he’d have disappeared into some Roma camp hundreds, maybe thousands, of kilometres away, he’d be buried away down in Campania or up in Trieste, across the Brenner and into Austria, or on a boat to Dubrovnik. But he was still here, in the city somewhere; he was looking out for his girl.
She hadn’t been wrong about him: Sandro clung to that. He’d thought Anna Niescu was a kind of holy simpleton when he’d first met her, like one of those country saints, but she wasn’t. She was flesh and blood, and she wasn’t stupid.
Where had he been, since whatever happened on Saturday afternoon? Who would have given him shelter?
Not Anna: he hadn’t asked her to help him, to hide him. He hadn’t contacted her directly. He was protecting her. From what? Not the police, because in fact it wasn’t the police he was afraid of.
The edifice built itself in Sandro’s head: wobbly, imprecise, a lopsided building of a theory, precariously balanced on a single assumption, of Anna’s instinct for a good man.
As he skirted the arcaded golden stone of Santa Croce’s northern flank, in his head Sandro mapped a route. He checked his watch: he had time, too. There were things he wanted to see along the way. He came out into the piazza and slowed as the heat hit him like a wall. Six-thirty-five, and he was sweating, the sweat that comes before the weather breaks. Overhead the sky was low and purplish-grey with cloud, a thick blanket smothering the city. He crossed the piazza — empty but for a couple of motionless figures on the stone benches — in a slow, precise diagonal, heading for the newspaper stand on the far corner.
Three streets fanned out from the Piazza Santa Croce’s western side, beyond them and overhead stood the crenulated tower of the Palazzo Communale, and there was something faintly surreal about the perspective, something puzzling to the eye in this heat. As he walked — almost swam in the terrible, humid air — in the wide empty space under the lidded sky, Sandro was for a moment assailed by the most awful feeling of being alone. And not only alone, but walking into a day he might never walk out of, walking to his own death, alone. The feeling was so powerful that if he hadn’t been more than halfway across, he might almost have turned and gone back, home to Luisa still mounded under the covers, and reached under for her warm hand, and stayed there.
But his feet continued as if he had no say in the matter, one in front of the other, and then the newspaper stand was in view and he could even read the day’s headlines on the placard the edicolaio was kneeling to fit into its wire frame.
ESTATE AGENT SLAIN IN BEAUTY SPOT
LOCAL MAN SOUGHT
CRIME RATE A SCANDAL, COUNCILLOR SAYS
His brain focused on the headlines, his feet kept moving and the streets leading off the square at an angle somehow regularized themselves. Sandro felt as though he had managed to fight off a kind of madness by purely mechanical means. By keeping on walking. At the edicola he reached over, the coin ready in his hand, and picked up an early edition of La Nazione. He crossed the road, his eyes on the paper.
The story was on the front page. He stopped. Someone hooted, someone else shouted. Sandro looked up, blinked, saw a guy on a motorino shaking his fist, and walked on. Reaching the pavement, he leaned against the nearest wall.
He hadn’t even read the words: the photograph had done it. A sleek Maserati — not quite so sleek as when he’d last seen it parked up under the city wall in San Niccolo. It was pictured at the side of what looked like a country lane, the low, square shape of a farmhouse some way off and out of focus, a verge of long, dry grass and seedheads, a neatly trimmed mulberry tree. And a vicious dent in the rear-wheel arch, very much as if someone had slammed it with a tyre lever. The personalized number plate: GALIMM.
Beside the open driver’s door, a forensics nylon tarpaulin covered an elongated, body-sized shape, almost but not quite out of the car. A dark stain not quite covered by the sheet, where the tarmac met the summer verge. And one shoe.
Slowly, Sandro pushed himself away from the wall, folded the paper and stuck it in his battered briefcase. He took the nearest exit from the piazza, which turned out to be the Borgo de’ Greci, then turned off to the left down a narrower street whose name he didn’t know. His general direction was fine, for the moment anyway, he was heading for the Carnevale, even if all thoughts as to what he might do when he got there had temporarily deserted him.
That little, sharp-faced, chiselling estate agent, Galeotti, impatient while they looked around the flat in San Niccolo. For a brief, mad moment Sandro thought, does this mean we don’t get a deal on that place? The man Sandro hadn’t trusted for a minute, with his goatee and his constant glancing at his watch and his flash car. Flash car: the keys to the flat in Via del Lazaretto, Sandro recalled instantly, had had a Ferrari fob, but he already knew, he had known from his first glance at the photograph, that when Luisa spoke to her old school friend in the condominium, she’d confirm as much. That Galeotti Immobiliare was the agency selling the Via del Lazaretto flat.
Coffee: that was what Sandro’s body instructed him. Before you open that newspaper again, you need a kick-start. He passed at least three bars that were shuttered up, scraps of paper posted on their doors carrying cheerful messages about when the direzione would be back from the seaside, and by the time he found one that was open, he was a street away from the Via dei Saponai, the bank and the Carnevale.
A dim little place under an archway, a tiny barman with a big handlebar moustache whom Sandro vaguely recognized: Orlando, was that the name? He didn’t ask, because if he knew Orlando from somewhere, then Orlando might know him. If they didn’t trust you when you were a policeman, they trusted you even less when you’d been kicked off the force. He got a coffee — lungho macchiato, he specified after a brief struggle with his conscience; less coffee, Luisa had said, think of your heart, consider a camomile now and then — and moved off to one of a handful of high, zinc-topped tables. He downed the coffee in one and when it kicked in, he felt the smooth acceleration behind his chest wall as something entirely health-giving and pleasurable.
Life was too short.
He hadn’t liked the estate agent, he hadn’t trusted him, but the sight of the end of a man’s life, even that of a venal, greedy man with a fussy little beard, was a sad thing. It couldn’t help but turn your mind to how it would look when it was your turn.
Claudio Brunello’s death hadn’t been any prettier. He’d been chucked like a bit of rubbish over a steel crash barrier to lie among fast-food wrappers in the dirt. That had been different, though. It came to Sandro that he’d never believed that the African market was where Brunello had died. It didn’t smell like it, didn’t feel like it, and after thirty years’ experience, you knew. This — and he opened the paper, shook it flat, looked at another photograph — this crime scene held the traces of this man’s last moments. The battered rear end of his car, his body half out of its seat. It was clear where Galeotti had died. But where had Brunello’s last moments come? It mattered. Not just to find his killer, but to reconstruct the man, the manner of his death, to find out why.